Free Crossing the Bridge by Michael Baron Page A

hospital three days after a successful procedure opened the blockage. He spent his time adjusting to lean meats and dramatically reduced sodium and working up his courage to ascend the stairs. I wouldn’t have thought his infirmity would have intimidated him so badly, but he slept several nights on the couch rather than making the climb, and on the nights when he did sleep in his own bed, he would stay there until close to noon the next day. His doctors told him that he needed to step up his level of exercise gradually, and at their suggestion, my mother purchased a stationary bicycle and a treadmill. But even though she placed them in the den where he was spending the vast majority of
his time, my father hadn’t been on either. He said he wasn’t ready.
    I wondered how much of my father’s response to recovery related to my refusal to take over the store. It hadn’t even dawned on me that my father making this proposition to me was as much a commitment of trust on his part as it was a convenient way to keep the business in the household. By turning him down, I suppose in some very real way I had announced to him that his trust didn’t mean much to me.
    If I had felt out of place in my parents’ house earlier, I now felt flat-out repressed. Anything I did (or, for that matter and much to my surprise, my mother did) could be interpreted as a disturbance and therefore a hindrance to my father’s convalescence. I could read or listen to my iPod in my room, which made me feel like I was still in high school, or I could watch television with the two of them. I chose as often as possible to do neither.
    But spending evenings out of the house was equally unfulfilling. None of my old friends lived here anymore. Amber wasn’t the kind of place that one moved back to. You could grow up here or you could discover the town later in life and choose to settle down, but once you left, you only ever returned for a visit. I reacquainted myself with several of my friends’ parents only to learn that all of those friends had moved to Boston, New York, or out of the Northeast entirely.
    And so I took to going out at night by myself, something I was never fond of but which I had grown accustomed to doing over the past decade. I went back to the bar that Tyler introduced me to and
outside of which Iris and I kissed. The music was listenable, the bartender was funny, and I didn’t feel particularly conspicuous if I found no one else to talk to. I also spent a fair amount of time at The Muse, a bookstore/café just off Russet Avenue. The espresso was good and, while it was clearly a place where locals got together to meet, there were always several people sitting by themselves with magazines or novels. After my third visit there, I decided to find out if it would take me longer to read all of John Updike’s fiction than it would take Howard Crest to sell my father’s store.
    My progress over the first couple of weeks was considerably greater than Howard’s was. He’d come into the store a few times to ask questions or meet with the store’s accountant, but he had yet to bring any potential buyers. When I asked Howard how long he thought the process would take, he was noncommittal, saying that, while small retailers were always interested in Amber, they weren’t necessarily interested in the kind of store my father had. This was a burdensome observation. An extended sale process meant that I had committed to spending much more time in Amber than I had intended. And all of it in a mind-numbing work environment, a frustrating home situation, and a social circle where I was on a first name basis with only the woman who made my coffee and the guy who poured my drinks.
    I needed an escape of at least a temporary kind. It was a Monday, I knew things would be quiet in the store, and I knew that Tyler was more than capable of dealing with anything that came up. I got in my car and headed over the Pine River Bridge. From
there, I simply drove.